In the final episode of Love Spells: A Novella, Angelique wondered if she would ever again see her mother, her sister, or Chuck, the father of her baby, who had disappeared one night. It was just her now… and the baby boy coming in only a few more months.

Episode 1

The sound of a truck horn that wouldn’t stop attracted the attention of a woman driving down a sandy backwater road. As she got closer, she found an old blue pickup truck rammed head-on into a hundred year old live oak tree that wasn’t going anywhere. Leaning on the horn, an unconscious young woman was hunched over the steering wheel, the white airbag draped like a parachute. The slight, almost fragile, older woman with wiry gray corkscrew curls all over her head stopped her car and got out. She tried the driver’s side door of the truck, but it was stuck. She banged on the window and yelled, but there was no response. She banged again. Nothing.

Running back to her car and digging her cell phone out of her bag, she dialed 911 and tried to describe her exact location. Finally she tried this, “You remember that crazy woman lives out in the swamp in the yellow house? Turn on the road that runs behind her house and go down until you come to a big stand of cathedral live oaks. Yes. Blue pickup. Yes. I’m standing right here. You’re an idiot. Where do you think I’m going?” She told the dispatcher she was going to hang up and call the truck’s owner. She scanned down her list of contacts, found Cynthia Ann’s number and dialed. No answer. She texted her. Found your blue truck and some chicklet in it. Don’t know if she’s alive. Call me. She muttered to herself, “If that doesn’t get her up out of the herb patch, nothing will.”

In a surprisingly quick response, Cynthia texted Where are you? She had been, in fact, deep into the herb patch in the midst of the fifteen varieties of catmint she was growing when the phone had vibrated in the pocket of her long apron. She kept the phone at hand because of her customers. People might call her crazy, but she knew how to keep her customers happy. When she figured out that her truck was actually gone, she also figured that she knew who the chicklet was. There was only one answer to that, the Angelique who had been living with her for two months, but why? She headed for the road behind her house.

By the time Cynthia Ann found her neighbor Myra and the blue truck, the ambulance had arrived and Angelique was sitting up on a stretcher while they took her pulse.

“What in the world, and I’m tryin to be polite here. What happened?”

“It’s like that tree came right up out of the swamp to hit the truck. I was trying to shift gears like I’ve seen you do and it came out of nowhere.”

“If you were trying to kill yourself there are better ways to do it! What were you thinking, child? And people call me crazy. You could have killed you and the young’un. Were you tryin to kill yourself? Look at you.” With no word from Chuck, the father of the baby, Angelique was five months pregnant and had been living with Cynthia Ann. Vote below on what will happen next by clicking view poll.